Practical Feedback for our Scholarship Entrants

She provides some interesting suggestions for article writing including:

Is the title captivating? Does it make your reader want to read the article? Does it use muscle words? Does the title reflect the content of the article? Article titles are as important as titles of Web pages, so please give them as much time and consideration.

She also points out why entrants should focus on appealing to the judges:

Hereâ€™s an interesting twist. If youâ€™re writing an article in order to win a contest, wouldnâ€™t you want to appeal to the judges? Of course you would. The judges are all professional people, and I have no doubt they would keep an open mind. But in a couple of cases, the writers didnâ€™t do due diligence in checking out the backgrounds of the judges or I donâ€™t think he/she would have written on the topics they chose. Judges are only human: remember that.

Thanks to Robin for helping with her judging and providing valuable feedback, we can all learn from.

I would argue that the most practical advice for this particular contest, economically speaking, was to have a catchy title. The judges didn’t come into play until you were a finalist, and since it was based on page views and not merit, a catchy title (or strategic linking campaign) was all that was truly required to generate the needed page views.

Of course, to win, your article needed to have merit, or at the very least, pander to the judges. But because of the way the beginning of the contest was structured, a catchy title gets you almost all the way there.